All this work... for what?? - Upgrading the Video Render Server

today's video is all about using the right hardware for the job so we actually learned a couple of years ago you can check that video up here if you want that just because you've got a workload that traditionally scales really well with lots of processor cores like video encoding doesn't necessarily mean that it will scale infinitely and we ran into a situation where adding more processing course to our video encoding server actually resulted in significantly less performance for spending significantly more money so we actually found that the sweet spot was somewhere in the 8 to 10 core range with frequency actually being far more important than core count beyond that point fast forward a couple of years though and the 6950x 10 core overclocked extreme edition processor that we equip this thing with is not only no longer the ruler of the roost it's actually significantly slower than even consumer-grade a-core chips that you can buy today for a fraction of the cost so we're going to pull this bad boy out get it dusted off swap out some hardware and see just how fast we can make her fly uh you guys ready for me to pull down the render server all good sweet thanks guys speaking of all good lttstore.com is full of all good cool stuff like this hoodie the house stealth hoodie is finally in stock go check it out that's lttstore.com we're going to have that linked in the video description [Music] before we go any further i feel like i should explain why we need a render server in the first place you might think well if you've got a powerful workstation surely you can cut together your video export it and upload it to youtube all without sending it out to a separate server for processing and we could do that but there are some workflow advantages to doing things the way that we do so whether we're shooting on our reds or on our canon c200s we take whatever file type that we originally shot we dump it into our premiere project and we set premiere to use a cineform timeline so cineform is a mezzanine codec that has great performance on the timeline and it retains a great deal of the image quality from the original file it also has some other advantages so compared to codecs that use iframes like h.264 cineform is much easier to kind of uh chop pieces out of without having to completely re-render your file so something that we can do is if we set our timeline to cineform render all the files out in cineform and then make a change like pulling a sponsor spot out for flow plane we can very quickly export two different versions of that video without taking up a bunch of time on the editor's workstation allowing them to get back to work now we could take that finished cineform file and upload it directly to youtube only problem is it's anywhere from 30 to 60 gigabytes for the average linus tech tips video which even though our internet here is really fast still takes a long time to upload to youtube because there are transfer speed limits on their side so what we need to do then instead is take our cineform file here you can see we're remoted into that server right now and convert it to h.264 which will not only upload faster on youtube it will also process faster and more reliably here comes oh man that's heavy okay oh all right let's see how brutal this thing is inside ready [Music] wow that's actually not that bad it's almost like dust filters are a really really good idea so let's walk through how this thing was configured in the first place we've got a triple 120 millimeter fan with some of noctua's industrial ppc fans on it for cooling it's actually you can't really tell but it's uh it's lifted about this much off the bottom of the server chassis so that as these fans draw air through the front of the case these ones suck that cool air up through the radiator and then the warm air kind of gets blown along this way for our reservoir we went with a like a metal one because i didn't want any risk of leaking whatsoever you can see it actually has very little evaporation too which is really nice a d5 pump because reliability is absolutely the most important thing in a build like this and raid one drives uh those aren't that reliable of drives those are 10 year old force 120. it doesn't matter we've got 32 gigs of ram this was the stuff we painted actually for a project quite a long time ago and then i went with a gtx 980. now normally you wouldn't need like a gaming graphics card in something like this but some of the workloads that it handles are cuda accelerated and we did get a performance improvement from that so we chucked it in there so the only things we're really replacing today are going to be the motherboard the cpu and the memory and then i also grabbed a an rtx 2080 ti to see if maybe after we upgrade our cpu there could be some benefit from a faster gpu so let's get started so pretty much every aspect of this is getting an upgrade we are dropping down from 10 gore's to a course but because they're faster ones i'm still expecting a performance improvement we're going from 26 66 megahertz memory all the way up to 3200 megahertz memory and that is with lower timings to boot and we're of course going from this older x99 motherboard to a new z391 so let's hope that since my last project using this thing i had to ultimately pull it out of my system because of a thunderbolt snafu our inventory team didn't actually take the water block off the motherboard because that would be a bit of a hassle for me to reinstall and they did oh they took the cpu out of it too uh guys i guess i'm gonna have to put the whole thing back on again oh oh they took it apart even more than it comes apart to start with this is going to take me a bit all right so that's done let's go ahead and pop this bad boy in here and oh yeah this board is wider than standard atx so i'm gonna need to move my ssds ah well that's some good double-sided tape i think i bet this drive now let's try and put the board in all right just need to plug in all the fans plug in our power and now we need to swap out our original cpu block for this one that cools the entire board and cpu and vrm and all that now i have a crazy idea normally you would think well linus the best way to do that is probably to drain the whole loop connect everything and then refill it but i think we can skip the draining step as long as we keep the part of the loop that we open at the highest point just a second i'm gonna prop it up on my graphics card i'm just gonna crack this open i can't find my vice grips so this is not really optimal but ah so everything that's under me is waterproof i think yeah tubing fittings reservoir industrial ppc fans there let's go ahead and undo the other side yeah not much in there now here's the risky part i need to keep these two level because if one goes too high the water will go down down down down down and splurge out the other side oh hi oh i think it's in now let's see if this one reaches i should just rename the channel to like low effort water cooling tips forget it i'm just gonna get a mac pro no i'm kidding that's not actually a better solution so these are 3 200 megahertz c14 now if gigabyte's not impressed with what i'm doing with their high-end gaming components i'm sure g-skill is on a whole other level here let's throw the gpu back in and then we're good to go this is really a very horrible mounting mechanism i'm not even going to try and screw it in this time i don't know why i bothered okay so all that's left is to fire it up and see if it still works there's definitely water in there come on baby try giving it ye old reseat ncmos clear and see if that resolves it hey whoa whoa hey hey hold on no idea what happened but it's up whoa bios has been reset nice so theoretically all we have to do is press 5.1 gigahertz oc and it'll work now this will probably take a few minutes changing chipsets and check this shiz out my friends we are booted not bad now neither of our network controllers have drivers here so i'm gonna have to download those but then we should be uh sitting pretty pretty quick here all right so while i reboot for a driver install we're just gonna top up the water here we did lose a little bit of water and our new block takes up a lot more of it so let's just do some precision pouring with the linus tech chips water bottle not a supported use case for the linus tech tips water bottle that's about as full as it was before i guess sick so the purpose of what we're doing here is to ensure that we're actually getting the 5.1 gigahertz that were advertised when the system's idle it's not necessarily going to be running at that speed but let's go ahead and hit it with a heavy cpu load and see what happens hey not bad okay then we survived our cinebench test so that means the last thing for us to do is try to enable xmp which will adjust our memory automatically to its faster speed and tighter timings i don't have a lot of hope for this it's a good sign that's a good sign too now that we've got that dialed in let's make sure it's not completely unstable do a quick cinebench extreme run eight threads at over five gigahertz ed oh yeah and your server has rgb now yeah so we seem to be stable we actually got 10 more points went from 568 to 578 so we're gonna go ahead and shut down cinebench here no i don't want to save it and uh ed show me where our sample project is why don't we do the tech link now tech linked even though it doesn't take that long to render is the kind of project where the faster it goes the nicer it is because it's only about 10 minutes but because we write shoot and edit it all within the same day the faster it exports renders and uploads the faster everybody gets to go home so let's go ahead and process is it just this one right here uh so i'm going to remove this from the queue and we're going to find out what do you think think it's going to be faster [Music] did it crash stopped did even the reset switch not work that's pretty crash let's turn xmp off and people wonder why i don't like xmp never works all right we've got one more trick up our sleeves i pulled two of the sticks i think 16 gigs of ram should be plenty for our workload here and we're gonna see if it's a little more stable without all the memory slots loaded up yep there it is good good good overclocked running at the right frequency all right let's try that sample project again now what's interesting is our cpu is actually only running at 4.8 gigahertz right now i wonder if xmp is kind of screwing us here all right guys we are really close to results time here so for tech linked our time to beat is nine minutes 48 seconds and it looks like we're gonna come in well under that let's have a look here come on baby you have got to be kidding me nine minutes and 19 seconds maybe we really did need those other two cores so here's the situation we only beat our score by about 30 seconds uh which is not the kind of improvement that we were looking for so there's a couple factors at play here one is that even though i don't think this is an avx workload it's kind of behaving like one so our cpu turbos to 5.05 or 5.1 in cinebench but only hits 4.8 here which looks like an avx offset so we're not getting quite the clock speed we were expecting and two it appears that my recollection may have been incorrect or adobe may have updated their encoder because our cpu is getting absolutely pinned to a hundred percent in many cases here it may be that we actually do need more cores so there's no way around it we need to reevaluate here this project has really challenged everything i thought i knew about our video export workload so what we're going to have to do is take things entirely back to the drawing board and to do that i've set up a test bench here so it's much quicker for me to swap things in and out with intel's 18 core 7980xe with the goal being to determine well gee exactly how many cores do we need for this how well does it scale so the idea here is once we know that we can then find the fastest chip with that many cores and try this whole thing again so based on what we're looking at here with loads anywhere from about the 75 to 85 range on this thing we can guess and this will be a far from perfect guess but we can guess that maybe something in the neighborhood of 14 cores could be the right answer fortunately we have a very unique ace up our sleeve this courtesy of our friends over at puget because the only way to get this chip is through intel's like secret special auction is a core i9 99 90 xe it actually has fewer cores than a 9980xc at only 14 versus 18 but it turbos to five gigahertz and its base clock is four gigahertz so why don't we give it a shot then charlie got nothing else to lose just time naturally changing out the cpu necessitates another motherboard swap so once again this poor aorus water cooled board is getting pulled from a project not because it did a bad job but just because it wasn't the right fit [Music] after all this going back to the original block so stupid how bad is it oh it's definitely dripping a bit now something to be aware of guys is that while electronics and water definitely don't mix as long as they're not powered the likelihood of doing permanent damage is actually very low not very low it's lower oh yeah i'm just looking pretty bad this time okay here we go and you're outta there beautiful where's that block yep it's on the floor so that goes to the inlet and that goes to the outlet go ahead and cut for the board i'm going with a primex 299 deluxe not for any particular reason other than that that's what i found on the shelf all right so here we go even though it's 14 compared to 18 cores because of its much higher frequencies this is a 200 205 watt tdp cpu and that's assuming that's accounting for intel's optimism with respect to their tdps all right now we're ready blocks on cables are routed strap it in all right it's reassembled please work like just work it occurs to me this is a relatively new cpu and i have no idea when this board's bios was last updated heck yeah heck yeah all right it's a good sign techlinked transcode.mov and it doesn't look like it's going to be any faster at all curiously our cpu usage is significantly lower than it was on the 18 core okay and our time is looking like it's going to come in just over seven minutes for the raw encode which should put us right around the same time so we're at 9 38 which is 10 seconds faster than our original configuration but actually 20 seconds slower than our water cooled overclocked 9900k but i think we can do a little better here it occurs to me that just because xmp didn't work on that other board doesn't mean it won't work on this one because it might have been optimized for quad channel operation so we're going to go ahead and try again with xmp good luck everyone well this puppy's definitely hauling now we're seeing turbo speeds floating right around the 4 gigahertz range and that estimated time remaining looks like it might be as much as 30 45 seconds faster than our last run what remains to be seen is whether or not it's stable surprisingly was stable enough to finish the render all right good job xmp hey 850. wow so we actually crushed our original time that time goes to show you what more cores more clock speed and faster memory will do for you wow that's almost by a full minute so now that we've at least managed to make the machine faster i think i'm going to stop fooling around because this is two full days that the editors haven't had their transcode server but i'm also feeling pretty inspired right now because we did manage to get better results than this with that weird 1u gigabyte overclockable server that we checked out a little while ago so what i think is that with a better designed water cooling system maybe a board with beefier vrms or something along those lines that we could push this further i think our 500 watt power supply might actually be holding us back as well so we're going to leave this one here for now but next time i'm going to be coming back at you guys with a custom designed enclosure that's really going to let this thing rip skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more and their premium membership gives you unlimited access to high quality classes on must-know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities in life and do the work that you love it's more affordable than most learning platforms out there with an annual subscription costing less than ten dollars a month and it's got tons of great stuff like you can check out christopher dodd who is a top teacher at skillshare he's a self-taught web developer who inspires and educates students his classes go over the fundamentals of web development and he has over 6500 students signed up for his courses the first 500 of you to use the promo link in the description are going to get your first two months for free so don't wait guys go check out skillshare at the link below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one that james is wearing it's like you're seeing double i'm also wearing it yeah lttstore.com uh also our community forum which you should definitely join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 2,203,489

Keywords: video, render, server, premiere, upgrade, intel, aorus, water, cooling, liquid, adobe, red, 8k, raw

Id: 8swaS6H5OiU

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I really hope these clickbait titles are bringing up their numbers because I have no idea what this video is about from the title and thumbnail and it's pissing me off

[u/crapusername47]

Their workflow is weird. At the start of the video Linus says they render:

• A version of a video with the intro, then the sponsor spot, then the main body of the video.

• A version without the sponsor spot for Floatplane.

They’re encoding the same footage twice unnecessarily. The video consists of three blocks - intro, sponsor, body. All they need to do is encode those three blocks separately and then join them together with ffmpeg’s concat feature.

Effectively, this would halve their rendering time and would offer a drastically greater performance improvement than switching out the CPU or any other realistic hardware upgrade could provide.

[u/thesynod]

All that work to learn there have been very small generational improvements from the 6th to 9th generation Intel chips.

[u/Tyler14827]

I hope the follow up is him trying a Ryzen 9 3900X instead of an Intel CPU. AMD for the win!

[u/lord_rel]

Considering the down time maybe it's time to expand the render section and have redundancy, a slower render server is better than down time, also distributing the encoding across multiple machines that are older but cheaper can get better results

[u/NinjaLion]

All I could think when i saw the water come out of that newer cpu block.

​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdiBG_TYZHA

[u/[deleted]]

What is that music in the background for the minute or so in that video? It's familiar.

[u/transformdbz]

I still didn't understand the reason why he took out that Gigabyte MB from his personal rig.